Understanding
Undergraduates adds to the literature on
“millennial” students by examining assumptions: assumptions that university teachers
make about successful students and that students make about themselves. Popovic and Green survey
thirty-eight university professors in four universities – two in the US and two
in the UK--, and they survey 1241 students in first-year classes. They compare those assumptions with the
findings of appropriate research, determining which are upheld by the research
and which aren’t. The most useful
thing about the book is the practical suggestions they offer for dealing with
those assumptions, either correct or not.

They find that both UK and US professors,
for example, believe that successful students expect to develop new study
skills, are punctual for lectures, keep up with assigned reading, and prefer to
sit at the front of class (50) – and the research supports those assumptions. They also, however, assume that
successful students perform volunteer work, belong to a particular gender or
ethnic group, talk to their teachers and ask questions, and form their own
study groups, assumptions that the research suggests are false. Some assumptions are particular to the
US context – the unsupported beliefs that good students use writing centres or
are unmarried, for example – and some to the UK context – that successful
students attend full time or feel they belong at university.

As I read, I found myself less surprised by
the results of the research and more by the sometimes shocking assumptions that
professors admitted to having. Also
surprising is the general conclusion that Popovic and Green come to about
student assumptions; in their surveys, students suggested that they already
have a pretty sound idea of what behaviours and attitudes make for a truly successful
undergraduate experience, but there is a disconnect between understanding what
works and altering behaviour to meet that understanding. For professors, then, the book insists that
we first acknowledge our assumptions and then test them against the evidence
before we bring them into the classroom.
When helping our students become more successful, we need to spend less
time on telling them what makes a successful student – they already know – and
more on helping them alter habits to make use of that knowledge.

The intended audience for Understanding Undergraduates is
explicitly university teachers, though there are some suggestion near the end
for what one can do to curb stereotyping at various levels in the
university. Moreover, Popovic and
Green are careful to locate their study in two specific contexts, the US and
the UK, and even in those two, there are differences. A Canadian
audience, then, may find the specific findings less applicable than the general
and surely sensible general conclusion: that trying to understand
undergraduates based on hasty generalizations and anecdotal evidence is more
likely to do harm than good.